A good egg steps up to help Grant Farms save their chickens from the broiler

Thousands of organic egg-laying chickens at Grant Family Farms spared from a fate worse than … well, being eaten or ground up … have found a second wind in the adoptive hearts of hundreds of people inquiring about their welfare.

You see, about 5,000 of their brethren were unceremoniously slaughtered last month by owner Andrew Grant, he says because the investors who took control of his farm’s financial affairs refused to pay for the eggs they’d sold — about $34,000. That money was to be used for feed for the roughly 15,000 chickens that laid eggs in painted abandoned school buses.

The owner of the chickens, a company named Six Dog Investment and owned by Grant live-in buddy Nick DiGiorgio, raised the birds and let the farm sell the eggs.

Anyway, Grant said no money for feed meant too many birds for what was left of the feed, so he whacked the 5,000 and tossed them into a ditch. Turned them into compost, as it were.

Meanwhile, Grant sold off thousands more for $1 each — some dead, others not — and whittled the flock to a few thousand egg-laying birds. Problem is, he still needs to feed them.

That’s where Teresa Redmond-Ott stepped up, a local vegan and owner of a small animal sanctuary who’d already done some bird rescue for Grant. Ott’s thing was that old birds that really weren’t able to lay any more eggs than could justify their employ at the farm were being sold off to …. well, places that wanted them more for their tasty thighs than their laid eggs.
So what Ott created was a retirement plan for the old birds, where the chickens could find a new home in someone’s backyard — Fort Collins is one of those places where urbanites can have a few of their own chickens in the yard for eggs or, well, you know… — and still lay a few eggs here and there for their new caretakers while living out the last of their chicken years in relative comfort.

With thousands of birds spared the slaughter, Grant hoped he could get some help feeding them. Ott and Grant put together a nice two-day event to help feed the birds — or adopt a few — that began today and runs through tomorrow.

Ott said she held no malice for Grant’s hatchet job on the poor cluckers.

“Desperate times often lead to desperate measures,” Ott wrote me in an email. “As a vegan and owner of a small animal sanctuary, I do not in any way like what Andy did with those sentient hens. However, I can extend my compassion, empathy and love to another human who was severely stressed with the bankruptcy proceedings.”

She’s referring to the Chapter 7 liquidation of the family farm Grant filed last month in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Denver. More than $10 million in debt made it difficult for the long-time farmer to meet his bills, though it was the farm’s third bankruptcy.

Ott said once word of the slaughter and subsequent need for help hit the media and Internet, she’d been buried with offers to help.

“I’ve had somewhere between 60-100 emails with an outpouring of folks offering to adopt and/or donate feed for the hens,” she wrote me. “Too many to count and they are still pouring in from as far away as Texas, Washington, D.C., and Casper, Wyo.”

So there it is. The Wellington-based farm is having the equivalent of a chicken open-house through tomorrow, so why not slide on by and have a gander … uh, look … at the birds to see if there are any that cook up … er, suit … your fancy.

Just don’t disclose what that fancy might be. It might scare a few of them and there are few things worse than a chicken riot.

David joined The Denver Post in 1999, his second go-round in the Mile High City. Since then he’s covered a variety of topics – from human services to consumer affairs – most always with an investigative bent. Currently he does investigations and banking.